Beware: Forbidden Fruit.
(Author’s Note: The SLO Tribune has spiked this piece, my regular bi-weekly column scheduled for publication this Sunday, Jan. 3, 2021. I'll only note that we disagree on what's newsworthy and deserving of comment in our era of COVID, which influences nearly every aspect of our daily lives. Happy New Year.)
LET US NOT FORGET
Day 288 – Sheltering in Place: A Journal
This New Year of 2021 offers the hope of COVID vaccinations for the masses and a chance to leave behind a year of suffering and misery on a scale most of us thought existed only in history books or far-away lands.
For some – the COVID deniers, the anti-maskers, the indifferent elected officials – the New Year might also bring the wish for mass amnesia.
They may hope we forget what we saw with our own eyes in 2020, our Year of Tears. They may pray we disremember what we experienced with our own lives in 2020, our Year of Sorrow.
They may wish we overlook what we knew to be true but they challenged as false with lies and selfish, deadly behavior, these people we once considered decent and honorable before 2020, our Year of Disillusionment.
The Great Plague of 2020 changed that about us. It exposed our true nature. The New Year’s tidings of comfort and joy trigger the deep-seated realization that we’ve seen the essence of people as they really are, not necessarily as they want to be seen.
We’ve seen those who are worthy of respect and admiration for their sacrifice – the health care workers, hospital janitors, grocery workers, mail carriers, delivery people, restaurant workers – the employees who had little choice but to show up every day.
And we’ve seen the hypocrites, the toadies and the seekers of financial and political advantage, the maskless who could have helped but didn’t because they cared only for themselves.
The year 2020 taught us that even the most self-righteous, moralizing and boastful among us can be weak of character and lacking in ethical foundation.
In this New Year of Hope, let us not forget the COVID deniers, the recidivist community health riskers, the acquaintances and former friends who rejected medical reality in servility to malevolent political partisanship, propagandizing and fact-free hectoring.
Let us always remember the elected officials who chose self-serving ideology over the public’s health, who chose wrong over right, cold heartedness over kindness in denying science, deflecting responsibility and defending doing nothing instead of something to make things better.
Raised Catholic, sentenced to Catholic schools, the Bible was beaten into me from an early age by eternally annoyed Irish nuns.
One of the most commonly neglected tenets of Christianity is the admonition to eschew the blinding, soul-corroding effects of self-righteousness.
Had that lesson been followed by those who could have helped hinder COVID’s spread but chose not to, there might be more of us alive today to celebrate the end of this most wretched of years.
I’m thinking in particular of local elected leaders at all levels who try to immunize themselves from criticism and public accountability by hiding behind preening displays of political ideology or religious faith – those who accuse critics of infidelity to principle while ignoring the consequences of it.
I’m thinking also of their followers – righteously extolling the primacy of personal freedom and the “right” to infect others at the expense of our entire community’s wellbeing.
The Book of Proverbs warns against self-righteousness: “There are those who are clean in their own eyes but are not washed of their filth.”
In the Epistle to Titus, Paul alerts us to hypocrisy: “They claim to know God, but by their actions they deny him. They are detestable... .”
The Gospel of Matthew warns of the consequences of both: “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.”
I’m reminded of Sister RoseMarie, who instilled in me and fellow grade-school inmates that self-satisfaction in faith leads to soiled hearts and minds in life.
She read us the Gospel of Luke’s parable of the self-righteous Pharisee in the temple who scorns the loathed tax collector as less holy than himself, while the tax collector asks God for mercy for being a sinner.
“For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
There are some exalted folks in San Luis Obispo County who could stand a humbling, if justice be served.
As we depart 2020, our year of sadness and despair, we enter a New Year bursting with hope and confidence that the worst shall pass.
We wish for a New Year filled with the promise of science, medicine, inoculation and health, and we look forward to becoming whole again.
We long for the possibility of reconciliation, redemption and forgiveness after a year of history far easier written about than lived.
In this New Year, let us hope our elected officials and their God-fearing acolytes abide the teachings they profess to embrace.
And let's not forget who they are and what they did.
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